Short-Term Dynamics of a Neotropical Forest

Since the mid-1970s, community ecology has undergone a slow shift away from a long preoccupation with questions of community equilibrium and stability. This shift has occurred not because these questions are unimportant; rather, it has occurred largely because current theory poses the questions too naively and in a manner that cannot be tested (Connell and Sousa 1983). Moreover, most ecologists now recognize that the stability and equilibrium status of ecological communities cannot be meaningfully discussed without reference to a defined spatial and temporal scale, because community change is inevitably continuous and scale dependent. No community of species achieves, let alone remains in, static equilibrium. Species continually wax and wane in relative abundance; they even go extinct locally and reimmigrate. These changes are due to exogenous (e.g., climatic, geological, and anthropogenic) forcing of the community and to endogenous ecological and evolutionary change. As with climate, the longer one monitors a com